Preciousness, Mushrooms and that other stuff

What it comes down to is the insistence that all we have now we must hold on to at whatever price. And that prospect of gains unknown and unquantified but potentially inspiring must be in all places repulsed. Supposedly this is in the interests of biodiversity. In reality it is in the interests of comfortable 9 to 5 weekday jobs environmental and farm subsidies, reluctance to be challenged and made to think too much.

I am not a biodiversity denier, the latest apparel of the right-wing climate change sceptics. But all new ways of seeing, all new legitimate targets are pounced on hungrily by those bandwaggon riders seeking an advantage before the rug is pulled. It may not be world wide but locally it's a biodiversity scam crafted to trouser farm subsidies.

Take the recent Eastern Moors Management Plan (Consultation draft). Among its numerous depressing statements, documenting interventions all over the place, is one to the effect that "some grasslands support important fungi and so will be managed with these in mind. They require short grass and so will be grazed by sheep". So in order put a few waxcaps under prime protection ( and I don't deny they can be really pretty) a whole system needs to be put in place with departments of Natural England alerted to bring on funding arrangements to enable certain farmers to provide woolly defecaters to cover the whole area with s**t. Blacka's grass also has waxcaps and they did not vanish when the sheep were away on holiday, but if they had been harder to find the gain in wild flowers was compensation.

As it happens I don't believe the theory anyway. Fungi grow underground. It's only the fruiting body that emerges above. Spores may not travel so far in the wind if the grass is longer but the idea you have institute a whole regime of farm style management to stop the waxcaps dying out is risible. The main argument, though, has to be about what is being missed by not allowing nature to go its own way. Unmanaged land and woodland bring their own species which have just as high a claim to have a place, even more so in fact because they are not managed. Let's have places where managers are conspicuous by their absence - and not just because they are in the office planning more intervention.